This is probably not a coincidence or an oversight, but rather a "what can we get away with" attempt, similar to previous efforts to remove UBlock Origin.
But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.
I'd personally expect three letter agencies to be involved here. The US government has been aggressively going after encrypted communication for years, with extreme tactics like personal intimidation and secret courts. Read this story about a secure email provider if you doubt it. [1]
This doesn't work so well with EU based companies, even though they have been pushing EU governments to do the same. (There recently was a leak that the encryption ban currently discussed in the EU parliament has some roots in Five Eyes efforts and that governments were pressured by the US to support it. Published by FAZ or Sueddeutsche, I'm trying to find the article...)
I also doubt that iMessage and What's App gaining "backdoors" to their encryption is purely motivated by user experience.
At a time where a lot of people want to switch communication platforms, nipping any such efforts early might well be viewed as important.
"Abusive content" is a convenient excuse that can be arbitrarily applied.
> But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.
There is an absolutely unprecedented shift going on as we speak, one of those groundswell events that have the potential to shift usage habits of hundreds of millions of people.
We got a taste just recently with the shift away from WhatsApp based on a TOS update. Imagine arguing last year that ten million users would jump ship based on a TOS change?
Matrix, and services of its ilk, are absolutely an existential threat to Google in the next 20 years.
Don’t forget that Google has all the threat intel you could possibly imagine from their existing analytics platforms. They will see the shift coming before anyone.
I can absolutely see them acting now to try to disrupt the initial rumblings of a seismic event that has the potential to go totally viral and popular sentiment shifts against megacorps.
Killing them gets exponentially harder over the next 6 months if there were a successful campaign across the internet to switch to these services, and 2021 is very close to seeing a very significant grassroots campaign like that truly take off. Certainly the time has never been better and the populace never been more primed to make the move out of the walled gardens.
Google has no (competitive) horse in the messenger race, so while that theory might fit your ideological point of view, I don’t understand why Google itself would have any incentive (or grounds) to remove an open source chat app.
Google counts up every minute users spend using their electronic devices.
In their world view, every single minute per day spent looking at screens that don’t have Google ad targeting is a minute that a competitor is stealing value from Google.
Facebook (24%) and Google (32%) compete pretty intensely for mobile ad spend. While we don’t know how much Facebook uses Google ads, that theory isn’t particularly satisfying because they compete so intensely.
> Facebook (24%) and Google (32%) compete pretty intensely for mobile ad spend. While we don’t know how much Facebook uses Google ads, that theory isn’t particularly satisfying because they compete so intensely.
Discord, a huge chat software, is hosted on Google Cloud. This might help explain why they tried to kill Element, a client for Matrix, a competing chat software with similar targeted user base.
This seems like a classic case of Hanlon’s razor and I don’t see any evidence to the contrary (yet).
An NSL would be handled a lot differently than removing an app from a single app store for sexual content. Every indication so far points to it being a mistake by Google.
The pattern is that their reviewers are really bad and the appeal process is almost nonexistent. Improving the quality would probably be a huge cost and they have no real reason to do that.
The app is back up and the Element folks agreed that there was what sounds like child pornography reachable from their domain. Overzealous automation perhaps, but obviously not a conspiracy.
You can view child porn on Chrome, or receive it by email, or download it by Torrent. Yet I don't see anyone banning web browsers, email clients, and Bittorrent client.
But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.
I'd personally expect three letter agencies to be involved here. The US government has been aggressively going after encrypted communication for years, with extreme tactics like personal intimidation and secret courts. Read this story about a secure email provider if you doubt it. [1]
This doesn't work so well with EU based companies, even though they have been pushing EU governments to do the same. (There recently was a leak that the encryption ban currently discussed in the EU parliament has some roots in Five Eyes efforts and that governments were pressured by the US to support it. Published by FAZ or Sueddeutsche, I'm trying to find the article...)
I also doubt that iMessage and What's App gaining "backdoors" to their encryption is purely motivated by user experience.
At a time where a lot of people want to switch communication platforms, nipping any such efforts early might well be viewed as important.
"Abusive content" is a convenient excuse that can be arbitrarily applied.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-the-...